Opera: Light, but is she fantastic?

The curse and shadow of Deborah Voigt hung over the Royal Opera’s revival of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. The American soprano, originally engaged to sing the title role — one of her best — for this series of performances, revealed earlier in the year that the management had released her from her contract because her ample frame would not fit into the slinky black cocktail dress designed by Herbert Murauer for Christof Loy’s modern-dress production.

On the opening night, disaster struck her replacement, the pencil-thin Anne Schwanewilms, at the end of her second big solo, the climactic soaring phrase of Es gibt ein Reich (There is a land), the heroine’s ecstatic outpouring of Todessehnsucht (yearning for death). In Strauss’s original, she has been abandoned on Naxos by the faithless Theseus; in Loy’s production, she is a rich Viennese matron, deserted by her husband or lover, who keeps a page boy, dressed